Dutch government publishes large project as Free Software

опубликовано: 2017-12-06

Написано пользователем Carmen Bianca Bakker

The Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations
released the source code and documentation of Basisregistratie Personen (BRP), a
100M€ IT system that registers information about inhabitants within the
Netherlands. This comes as a great success for Public Code, and the FSFE
applauds the Dutch government's shift to Free Software.

Operation BRP is an IT project by the Dutch government that has been in the
works since 2004. It has cost Dutch taxpayers upwards of 100 million Euros and
has endured three failed attempts at revival, without anything to show for
it. From the outside, it was unclear what exactly was costing taxpayers so much
money with very little information to go on. After the plug had been pulled from
the project earlier this year in July, the former interior minister agreed to
publish the source code under pressure of Parliament, to offer transparency
about the failed project. Secretary of state Knops has now gone beyond that
promise and released the source code as Free Software (a.k.a. Open Source
Software) to the public.

In 2013, when the first smoke signals showed, the former interior minister
initially wanted to address concerns about the project by providing limited
parts of the source code to a limited amount of people under certain restrictive
conditions. The ministry has since made a complete about-face,
releasing a snapshot of the
(allegedly) full source code and documentation under the terms of the GNU
Affero General Public License, with the development history soon to follow.

In a
letter to Dutch municipalities earlier in November, secretary of state Knops
said that he is convinced of the need of an even playing field for all parties,
and that he intends to "let the publication happen under open source
terms". He went on to say: "What has been realised in operation BRP
has namely been financed with public funds. Software that is built on top of
this source code should in turn be available to the public again."

These statements are an echo of the Free Software Foundation
Europe's Public Money, Public Code
campaign, in which we implore public administrations to release software funded
by the public as Free Software available to the citizenry that paid for it.

The echoes of 'Public Money, Public Code' do not stop
there. In a
letter to the Dutch parliament Wednesday 29 November, the secretary of state
writes about the AGPL: "The license terms assure that changes to the source code
are also made publicly available. In this way, reuse is further supported. The
AGPL offers the best guarantee for this, and besides the GPL (General Public
License), sees a lot of use and support in the open source community.

"Publication will happen free of charge so that, in the public interest,
an even playing field is created for everyone who wants to reuse this
code."

This is big news from the Netherlands and an unprecedented move of
transparency by the Dutch
government. Following a
report to the Ministry of the Interior about publishing government software
as Free Software (Open Source Software), it seems that this will happen more
often. In it, Free Software is described as making the government more
transparent, lowering costs, increasing innovation, forming the foundation for a
digital participation society, and increasing the quality of code.

"We applaud the Dutch government for releasing the source code
for BRP. We have been asking for this method of working since 2001, and it is
good to see that the government is finally taking steps towards Free Software.
In the future, we hope that the source code will be released during an earlier
stage of development, which we believe in this case would have brought issues to
light sooner", says Maurice Verheesen, coordinator FSFE Netherlands.